


Confluence

by GRRM



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Cunnilingus, F/M, Hand Jobs, Not Beta Read, Pining, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-Episode: s08e03 The Long Night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-30
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2020-03-29 20:09:56
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,652
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19027057
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GRRM/pseuds/GRRM
Summary: “Whydidyou come here, then?” she bites out.“Brienne,” he says, with infinite exasperation.





	Confluence

“Will you join us?” Lady Sansa asks, as the pyres burn in the afterglow of dusk. Great crests of smoke surge and subside like restless waves. To her right, Brienne can hear Tormund telling Pod about the whispering languages of the old gods.

Every man and woman well enough spent the daylight hours piling mangled bodies beyond the northern gate after the injured were ushered within the castle by Maester Wolkan. They had all been possessed by a senseless, numb kind of urgency—no one quite believing it was over, that the dead would _truly_ no longer rise again. There had scarcely been enough time to scrub clean and change garbs before the dragon queen made her solemn speech and lit the torches.

At some point while Brienne had been blinking into the flames, tasting ash and trying valiantly not to see writhing bodies beneath her eyelids, Jaime touched the inside of her wrist at the edge of her glove. He had murmured something too quiet to hear and slipped away before she could protest.

“My lady,” Brienne says, “if you need me—”

“No. I only thought you might prefer the company. Forget it.” Lady Sansa’s eyes are red but she holds herself with quiet dignity; more than ever, Brienne thinks with fierce certainty, she looks _queenly_. “Thank you, Brienne, for everything.”

Brienne inclines her head. 

A knowing edge sweeps through Sansa’s expression before she turns back towards her siblings. “Pass my gratitude along to Ser Jaime also.”

Brienne gives Pod leave soon after, waving him off with impatience when he haltingly asks her permission to join their celebrations. The fractured atmosphere after battle is inevitable—everyone still spirited with adrenaline but hushed quieter than usual with sorrow. Brienne _loathes_ it. The strangeness, the draining terror, while the crows circle overhead as if nothing has changed at all.

As she walks alone across the wintery courtyard there is a ringing in her ears that resonates phantom pain through her skull and down her spine, like the shiver of metal when two swords impact. She feels weighed down and thinks, abstractly, of returning to her chambers in the Great Keep, of tending the fire and slipping beneath thick furs.

She rouses from her thoughts on another path entirely. All at once she is seized by deep frustration. It’s a restless feeling that has been churning within her ever since Jaime arrived in Winterfell several days ago, and if she’s honest with herself likely long before that—tension that emerges only in biting remarks and bewilderment. She wonders which of them the greater coward is, to allow this fraught, unspoken unease to grow between them, and resolves in a sudden rush of will to _settle it_.

The door to his chambers in the guest house is ajar and she shoves it open without knocking, not allowing herself the moment of hesitation.

“Ser Jaime,” she says.

The room is tiny, lit only by a few sparse candles in the deepening twilight, and _cold_. Tyrion hadn't mentioned that, when he assured her the day before that his brother was not, in fact, sleeping on a stone floor somewhere.

Jaime sits at a wooden chair beside the window. Outside, the edge of the shadowy Godswood is visible, the place eerily still with an untouched blanket of new snow where mere hours ago the ground was bloodied around the icy pools.

He’s dressed in only a shirt and dark breeches, feet bare, haphazardly leaning over to dress a nasty burn on his calf that he had winced at but waved aside in the small hours after battle. 

“Ser Brienne,” he responds, straightening to look at her with a familiar slither of wry amusement. Now that she has a chance to pause, she realises that he looks almost as terrible as she feels: bruised and scraped all over, exhaustion settled in the turn of his mouth.

“Why did you leave so soon?”

“I felt dead on my feet,” he says. She makes a face, and he smiles. “Poor timing?”

She walks towards him, two strides to cross the span of the room, before gracelessly dropping to her knees on the hard floor, gentling the linen out of his hand. He watches her and she feels suddenly small under his gaze, an altogether peculiar feeling for her, trapped like a butterfly in glass.

“You don't have to,” he starts.

“I know,” she says, dismissive.

She straightens his clumsy bandaging, tutting unhappily, careful not to graze his wounds with her long gloved fingers as she unravels it to start over. He exhales noisily.

“Lady Sansa wished to thank you,” Brienne says.

“How terribly civil of her.”

“Ser Jaime,” she admonishes. “We could not have held them as long without you.” She pauses. “ _I_ could not have.”

His voice is a little hushed when he asks, tangential as usual, “Will you ever stop calling me that?”

She blinks, glancing at him. “Pardon?”

“ _Ser_ Jaime,” he mocks with derision. “Always so formal, even in private. After everything. We saw each other's flesh long ago in Harrenhal, if you recall, and yet it is always still _Ser Jaime_. As if we are strangers still.”

She flushes hot.

“Jaime,” she says, like it is easy—like anything between them has ever been _easy._  She wraps another layer of linen around his calf, making sure it's secure.

Jaime sobers under her methodical attention and after the silence stretches on and on and threatens to drown them, answers her earlier question, “They are not my people to mourn.”

Brienne's hands pause as she looks up at him. After everything, he still has the ability to surprise her.

His eyes are dark in the dim light, under the shadow of his lashes. The steady way he regards her is warming until it transforms into a penetrating scrutiny, something that threatens to swallow her whole and she’s forced to glance away, feeling foolish and clumsy like a girl.

She thinks, abruptly, of Lady Catelyn and her straightforward honesty. Brienne has always valued frankness but she never excelled at that particular kind—the kind that turns you inside out and leaves you raw.

When she was small and her mother was wasting away, Brienne would sit by her bed, ignore the smothering scent of decay and read aloud thick books describing the ancient Five Forts overlooking the vast Bleeding Sea; the sprawl of old Valyrian roads; the tremendous wall of ice so far from their sapphire waters. Her mother would say weakly, _I fear it,_  and all Brienne could bear to do was grasp her hand, so much smaller than Brienne’s.

“They are your people now,” she says.

“No.” There is something sharp in his tone. “Besides, I didn't slog my way through those wretched northern tracks for them.”

And all at once she is just _angry_ —totally, irrationally furious. She ties a tidy knot in the bandages with more harshness than she intends.

“Why _did_ you come here, then?” she bites out.

“Brienne,” he says, with infinite exasperation.

But she can’t quite look him in the eye, fiddles uselessly with the dressing instead. Anger shifting rapidly into something else, something nameless. It is unbearable. She thinks of all of the mockery she has swallowed in her life for being obvious, easy to read and even easier to hurt. She thinks of all the barriers she painstakingly erected that mean nothing when it comes down to it. She thinks, _I wish I could hide myself better._

He reaches forward, slow, and runs his thumb over the fissure of the scar on her upper lip. “I am glad you are alive.”

The walls within her shatter. She is crystalised. She can no longer bear to think.

She surges forward and upwards while still kneeling and captures his lips—warm, soft, parting around a breath—with her own. Open-mouthed against him for one moment of blind courage and certainty. Hands still on his leg. Then a voice from some forgotten memory hisses, _women like you will never feel that._ She’s jerking away, wide-eyed, no air left in her lungs, seized by fear. What in Seven Hells possessed her to—to—

“Ser Jaime. Forgive me.” She clambers to her feet, squeezing her eyes shut for a split second in shame, in horror, turning towards the door. Her pulse is rabbiting in her veins; her body is too large; she always fills up too much space.

“Brienne. _Brienne_.” He grabs her forearm hard enough to bruise. “You absolute, unimaginable fool.”

Her mind is too loud. She says, in abject misery, “I know.”

But he's reeling her in and walking her backwards at the same time. “You have ruined me,” he says, fierce, clutching at the back of her neck.

She feels dizzy, spinning on a thread. _What is he—_

He murmurs into her ear low, lips brushing her skin, turning her feverish, transforming her to _wildfire_ , “I was ruined from the beginning. From the moment all those moons ago when you slashed the throats of those northmen in front of me.”

"That was not a seduction,” Brienne protests.

Jaime pulls back, tilts his head, smirks. “It wasn't?”

And then he is surging forward on his toes and kissing her, jolting and sudden, crowding her against the cool stone wall and thoroughly _devouring_ her.

Her blood turns molten.

His nails scratch up through her hair as he curls his hand into a fist, tugs. She has never in her life backed down from a fair fight. Or _any_ kind of fight, if she's honest. She bites at his bottom lip savagely and takes his gasp as opportunity to lick into his mouth, to run her tongue along the edge of his out of sheer instinct.

He breaks away to laugh, to exclaim in delight, nonsensical, “I knew it. I _knew_ you would be—”

And he leans back in as if he can’t bear to not be touching her for more than a moment. He cups her face in his hand and kisses the swollen cut at the edge of her lower lip, follows a hungry path to her cheek. His beard scratches her skin, rough. She swallows an embarrassing, desperate moan, both hands curled uselessly by her sides as he tears the heavy pelt cape from her shoulders, casting it aside. For once she isn't wearing her armour, much of it still gory from battle back in her chambers.

“Have you done this before?” he asks, low, mouth brushing hot against the skin under her ear. “Has anyone kissed you? Have you _let_ anyone?”

She stifles a snort at the idea, of her _letting_ someone, of the strange note in his voice past the tease that could be mistaken for _pleading_.Who else could she possibly find worthy, even if she had the choice?It hits her then in a nonsensical wave of heat— _Jaime, Jaime, she's being pinned against a wall by_ Jaime.

“Brienne,” he says sternly. Beautiful, infuriating, cocksure Jaime Lannister. A man who has commanded _armies_.

Though she supposes she has now, too.

“Just you," she replies.

She feels his fierce shudder as he captures her mouth again. There is something slick and heady about it—she can smell him, taste him, a spice that's familiar and unfamiliar all at once. Her hands lift to his face, mirrored on either side of his jaw, over his greying beard. They are both of them so much older now.

“Gods, why are you wearing this?” Jaime groans against her skin, mouth following the vulnerable tendons of her throat as he wrestles with the fastenings of her belt one-handed, giving up to pull her gloves off and smooth his fingers over each palm in turn. “I wish I could rip it all apart.”

Something light and happy buoys within her. “You gave it to me.” She shoves his hand away and unfastens the belt with distracted precision as he kisses her neck. Her sword and scabbard fall to the floor with a clatter. “Sunbursts and lions, red and gold.” _Did you think I wouldn't agonise over it during sleepless nights?_ she thinks. _When people sneered at my gold and called me the Kingslayer's whore?_ He laughs against her. The leather jerkin drops soon after and she is left in just her shirt and soft cotton pants, trembling, bone-deep exhausted but thrilling with tension.

Until a rush of dejected panic slides through her when he pushes his thigh between her legs. She twitches her head back.

“Jaime,” Brienne says, frowning crossly at how breathless she sounds, how unfamiliar the pitch of her voice is. “I am—” And her hand jerks over her body abortively. She can’t help but think of Cersei, slender and resplendent in gowns made of sunlight, the vicious beauty of a lioness. _Why me?_  

“My lady,” Jaime murmurs, pulling her towards him, his golden hand resting against the subtle curve of her waist under unflattering men's clothing. “My knight.” He drops her wrist and strokes his flesh hand down the side of her hip, to the rigid muscle of her thigh, curving around, making her shiver. “I could describe all the places I have dreamed of kissing you.”

“Do you ever _shut up?_ ” she whines, disbelieving.

“Maybe you should make me,” he says with casual arrogance—a teasing challenge, and so she _does._

She kisses his mouth again, pitching her face down to meet him and pushing all of her fingers up through his hair, longer than when she saw him in the dragonpit all those months ago, or perhaps a lifetime ago. He makes a soft, delicious sound into her mouth as she presses herself fully against the unyielding line of his body. They are so close in height, Brienne only a thumb taller, and she forgets to feel self-conscious over the way they fit together. She feels her nipples tighten under the thin material of her shirt brushing against his chest—from either the cold or the contact, she isn't sure.

Jaime shoves his leg further against her deliberately, hand unyielding just under her arse, and she inhales, arching into him. She can _feel_ his smile on her lips. And she can feel something else entirely, hard and unmistakable against her thigh. A shiver of pleasure pulses through her, down her abdomen and between her legs. _He wants me. Me._ It seems ludicrous.

For all of her inexperience, Brienne isn't naive; she’s slid her hand beneath the furs on cold nights when sleep seemed just out of reach, yet another stoic task, Oathkeeper resting beside her in bed, trying not to think of anything in particular and failing miserably. A warm hand and green eyes, her face being shoved roughly down into the dirt, _taking_ it. Falling at last into the whir of unconsciousness with a sickly, guilty wave because she knew intimately all the things she could never have, even those thoughts most unkind—absurd, unworthy desires she'd scoff at in the light of day.

She feels the tension run through him as she reaches for his golden hand and begins steadily loosening the straps. Leaning her head back against the wall as she does it, she watches him, managing to gather up a facade of easy confidence that feels more at place for her on the battlefield.

Jaime looks at her, glances down at the chafed skin of his wrist, and looks back at her once again with something vulnerable splintering in his eyes. “Is this—do you—Brienne.” He cuts himself short. His jaw clenches. He visibly steels himself. She basks in his uncharacteristic nervousness. “What I mean to say is, do you really want this?”

 _“This_ ,” Brienne repeats, adopting the taunting lilt she learnt from him.

“Me,” he clarifies. 

They really are both idiots, she realises.

“I think about you,” she says, quiet as smoke in her confession as if it will dissipate into the air and she can pretend it never happened.

“Good things, I hope.” His voice is so rough it lights her up with lust. There's something predatory and hard in his expression when he adds without a smile, “Though bad is fine too.”

Brienne reaches over to place the damned golden hand on the small table beside his bed. Touches the scar tissue of his wrist tenderly. Feels unmoored when she thinks of all he has done for her. All he lost for her. All he has given her. More than she could ever deserve.

“I think about duty,” she says, slow, unused to speaking these helpless parts of herself to life. "I think about honour."

Jaime is shaking slightly under her hands now, his own hand on the small of her back, a wild look in his darkened eyes.

She continues, “I think about how much I wish we could be free of it all, if only for a while.”

“Come now, Brienne,” Jaime murmurs, affection creeping into his tone. “Surely you think about more than just that.”

He reaches up and runs his thumb over her nipple through the cotton, lightly but enough to make her bite her own bottom lip and stutter her hips forward an inch. She wants to feel him _everywhere_.

“As for me, I've thought about how far your stubbornness goes,” he says. His fingers close around the sensitive flesh and she moans. “If you would _permit_ me—what you would sound like if I—”

He cuts himself off to kiss below her throat, close to the raised and grisly scars above her collarbone, the juxtaposition of an ugly part of herself that she loves so fiercely. There is something feral heaving within her.

His hand lowers to rest near the laces of her pants, a question. Brienne breathes, “ _Yes,_ ” and he begins to yank at them impatiently, before suddenly changing course and ripping her shirt open instead. She clumsily works on the ties of his shirt in turn as he runs his hand hungrily over the muscled plane of her abdomen, tender with bruises from the press of her armour, upwards to cup one small breast in his palm. In a graceful arc, he curves himself over her and runs his tongue over her nipple, pushing the shirt off her entirely and letting it pool carelessly on the floor. She practically convulses, bites hard on her own tongue to keep from making another desperate noise, clutching at his back. Something about the wetness of it making her blush all the way down her chest.

“ _Jaime_ ,” she gasps when he kisses her there just like he kissed her mouth before passing his teeth over her teasingly. His hand is back to undoing her laces, struggling with the task as she presses herself into him insistently, trapping his hand, knowing nothing except the urgent need to be closer, closer, _closer_.

His stump hovers near her skin without touching and she pulls it that final distance with her free hand, resting it on her breastbone, giving him silent permission. She shudders and he mirrors her with a tremor, face hidden, tipped low where his lips rest against her ribcage. Brienne realises with sudden bright awareness that he is willing himself not to recoil from the contact, as if expecting her to be _repulsed._

“I would ask for all of you, or none of you,” she whispers simply into his hair, heart pounding.

Jaime laughs shortly, a choking kind of laugh that sounds halfway towards a sob. “Of course you would.”

He jerks, tries to tug his arm out of her strong grip, tries to shift his head away from where her other hand cradles it.

“Yield,” he says softly, and Brienne thinks about words he said a lifetime ago, trying to make her blood rise in a different way: _I'm strong enough_. She releases him.

Without ceremony he drops to the floor just as she did earlier. His hand plays with the now-untied laces. Looking up at her coyly through his lashes, he rests his cheek against her leg for a moment, pupils blown wide. “Ser?”

Brienne sucks in a breath. “Yes,” she says and he makes quick work of pushing her breeches and smallclothes off, letting them pool around her ankles. She closes her eyes tight, feeling exposed. _Surely he isn't going to—_

He peppers kisses over her thigh, then on her soft stomach, almost chastely moving towards the thick nest of hair between her thighs. She cannot bear to look. He urges her to part her legs where she had been squeezing her knees together.

“Please,” he says with heated desperation. “ _Brienne._ ”

Glancing down for a fraction of a moment, she shuts her eyes again at the overwhelming image of Jaime Lannister, kneeling between her naked thighs like he's praying, like he's seeking absolution. Not even her most treacherous dreams were this bold. She still has her boots on. Her legs shake.

“Anything,” Brienne whispers, and means it.

Jaime kisses the delicate juncture of skin where her thigh meets her groin like a _thank you._ The tips of his calloused fingers brush the exposed edge of her tentatively, exploring the wetness he finds, seemingly fascinated, and she helplessly twitches her hips forward as her head falls back to meet the wall in surrender. It's only then that he licks a path where she is most vulnerable, parting her lips with his mouth, in no hurry. His tongue finds that sensitive spot her fingers have touched on lonely nights, circling around it. Lips follow in something of a long, smothering kiss.

He pulls back with an obscene sound to chastise her, “Stop that, ser,” though the sharpness is tempered by how affected he sounds himself. Brienne realises she's holding her wrist to her mouth to stifle her noises. Brutal, unfeminine noises, she knows, just as she utterly fails to silence them—she remembers with absurd clarity being mocked by the boys back home when she sparred with them. Here is another place where she fails being meek and demure and _womanly_.

She still can't bring herself to open her eyes, as if she will shatter everything out of this dream-world and back to reality.

Jaime grabs her elbow when she doesn't immediately obey, yanks it away with only mild violence. Then he lunges back to his task with enthusiasm, with _hunger,_ sucking at her swollen nub directly now, careless towards her overwhelmed sensitivity and heaving breaths. To his beard itching her skin raw. To the trembling of her knees fighting to keep her upright. To the throb of her pulse that seems to have overtaken her entire body. He is almost ruthless in the way he finds out with experimental pressures what makes her fall apart. She makes a guttural sound like she's dying. And maybe she is. Maybe this is war. He groans every time she does in some kind of animal conversation and she thinks, deliriously, _he always has to have the last word._

The world is lit up and she doesn't notice his hand on her, his knuckles brushing where she's _dripping_ now, until two fingers slide into her, uncoordinated but sure. The sensation is strange, as if being filled has only made her achingly aware of how empty she is. How empty she's always been. Her hips undulate hard without her control, begging for something she can't put into words, on a precipice with nothing beneath her. She manages to open her eyes, the hardest thing she's ever done in her life, but worth it to see his intense half-lidded gaze looking up at her in the glint of dancing candlelight, with an expression akin to  _awe_. Perhaps she's going mad. She's _definitely_ going mad.

Then he crooks his fingers, angles them hard against some place within her she didn't even know existed as his tongue laves over her again and again and again, a remorseless torture, and she forgets to think at all, pushing closer into his mouth. 

She's flying. She's weightless. The room has tipped on its axis. Overwhelming pleasure ripples through her core in long, unforgiving rushes and she feels herself contract tight around his fingers. The sharp little pained cries she hears are emerging from _her throat_.

When she comes back to herself in a slow bloom like the rising tide, Jaime is stood up against her again, pressing her to the wall with his weight, practically propping her upright. He murmurs nonsensical words into her jaw as he embraces her. She can feel the throb of her heart where she's most sensitive as the dogged tiredness and aching of her limbs creeps back into her awareness. For a moment, she feels deeply, irrationally ashamed, until he kisses her lips like she's something precious and she tastes herself in his mouth, and then tips his head back to look at her with a warm expression, with all of his golden charm. And yet, there's an edge of something _dangerous_ in his eyes. Something she hasn't seen there since all those years ago picking through soggy fields in the Westerlands when he was trying to goad her into a fight. 

“What do you want, Brienne? Tell me.”

How many times has he said her name, in the past? Has it always made her feel this way to hear it on his lips?

“You,” she says frankly.

“Ever the conversationalist.” His voice is deeper than usual and it seems to reverberate through her. He runs his fingers over the shell of her ear fondly and she thinks, _those were just inside of me_. She quivers. She feels the dampness between her legs, still exposed. He arches a brow. “Be more specific.”

“Jaime,” she says mulishly despite her blush. Ridiculous, that she even has any blood left to blush with. “I don't know—”

“Sure you know,” he presses, tone casual. “You said you _thought about me_. Was it a deception, my lady? Are you truly a temptress in armour?”

She frowns impatiently. Pushes him away and towards the bed, surprising him for a moment. “You are insufferable,” she says, too tired to play this game with him. His shirt is open at the front and she puts one broad hand on the wiry hair of his bare chest and _shoves_. He falls back onto the furs without resistance, never tearing his gaze away from her. Carefully, she rids herself of her boots and breeches, shaking them onto the floor before climbing up, entirely naked as she straddles his clothed thighs and towers high over him. Some reflexive part of her wants to hide herself, but the steady look in his eyes halts her. It's an exhilarating rush, to have him beneath her like this. She throws a great shadow across him. 

“You are perfect,” he says with excruciating sincerity. 

A blotchy, mortified flush settles high on her cheekbones. She isn't accustomed to kindness and flattery, especially not from _him_ of all people.

“You called me a beast, more than once.”

His lips quirk lopsided, not the least bit abashed, hand finding the generous weight of her hip as if to balance her. “As you called me _Kingslayer,_ ” he retorts.

Brienne smiles a little in spite of herself.

“Perhaps,” she starts, hands seeking out the strings of his pants. Cuts herself off when the heel of her palm brushes him, hard and obvious under the fabric. She tints pink to her ears but doesn't pull away. Instead, she trails her fingers over the insistent edge of him.

“Perhaps?” Jaime asks indulgently, almost innocently, counterpoint to the way he rocks into her touch.

“You know I'm better with swords than words,” she says, short on breath, making quick work of the knots and trying to ignore her fear. A conditioned expectation of ridicule. “Perhaps you should tell me what _you_ think about.”

“Oh!” He sounds positively gleeful. Mulls it over for a long moment thoughtfully. “Do you remember Riverrun?”

Brienne nods out an _of course_. Her fingers slide underneath the cotton to touch his overheated flesh clumsily. She hesitates before frowning, frustrated at her own shyness in these matters, forcing herself to think, his _cock_. She has seen cocks. She has seen _his_ , in fact—difficult to avoid it, pissing in woods on a chain for weeks. But never like this. A smouldering fire blazes anew under her flesh and she blinks rapidly, shyly, as she pulls him out. No one has ever _desired_ her.

“When you came to my tent just to lecture me on knightly integrity—Oh, yes,  _exactly_ like that,” he groans as she strokes the length of him.

“I did not lecture you on anything.”

He ignores her, thrusting shallowly into her grasp with wanton desperation, utterly shameless in it. “When you groped for the sword— _ah_. I've thought about it over and over, in retrospect. You were so—so _good_ , Brienne. Brienne. I've thought on it  _so many times_.” He gasps, puts his hand on her neck and pulls her down flush with him until their mouths are mere inches away. “ _You are so good_ ,” he says as her wrist brushes his balls on a downward twist _._ His breath is hot against her cheek. “I—I thought I had purged the image but on my journey north it returned to haunt me again, night after night. I was helpless, my lady. I split myself in half to come here but there you were—leagues away, still filling the empty spaces. Even the cold couldn't shut you out. I thought about how you couldn't quite look at me. Back then. How we—we were speaking a thousand different conversations without words. I wish I could have just pushed you down into the hard floor— _ah_ —pulled apart that cursed armour I gave you, and _fucked_ you right there. Heedless to everyone outside. Made you _wail_.”

She moans weakly, kisses the delicate skin of his temple as she tugs on him between their bodies, fingers shifting over his foreskin. She still doesn't know what she's doing, but he's so responsive and warm, engorged and solid and—when she glances down to catch the brief, vulgar image of holding him _wanting_ in her hand, beading precome over her fingertips—so red it almost looks painful. His mouth accidentally brushes a cut on her jaw, making her wince. _This is real,_ she thinks _, we’re alive;_  a reminder so staggering she presses her eyes shut against a sudden onslaught of tears.

“Would you have let me, Brienne? Would you have _had_ me back then? I suspected, but—would you have allowed me between your thighs?”

 _No_ , she thinks. Her hand clenches around him a little more tightly than she intends, forcing his gasp.

“I don't know,” she answers honestly.

He groans, uninhibited. His cock jerks once and that's all the warning she gets before he's coming over her fingers, hips lifting. “ _Brienne_ ,” he says, like he's wounded, like his climax has been shocked right out of him, looking right into her eyes open-mouthed and unguarded.

 _Jaime_ , she thinks. And then remembers him in the bathtub, feverish and utterly vulnerable, weakly protesting the name she used for him then. “Jaime,” she says aloud, with feeling. She kisses his bruised cheekbone, milking him through it carefully as if she can press her devotion through his skin, her knuckles slick with the remnants of his pleasure. 

Jaime turns his head to kiss her messily, pushing his tongue into her mouth in a dance like this is the last chance they'll get. Maybe it is, she thinks. The kiss turns softer and more kind in incremental moments as she eases her hand away.

Something about him changes in the minutes that follow, as she finds a rag to clean them both up with, as he helps her remove the last of his clothes and pulls her beneath the furs with him and a simple pleading, “Stay.”

Curled with her back against his body and his stump slung across her waist, she feels warm, submerged in a light-headed contentment that eases the nagging pains in her limbs.

“Brienne,” he says, tentative, soft. She angles her head a little towards his voice.

“I know what you're going to say,” she murmurs when he doesn't continue.

His arm shifts against her and she feels his breath stirring her hair. “You do?”

“The Others are defeated. You cannot stay.”

He's silent for a while. “I want to,” he breathes, wistful. She hears his meaning, _I want to stay here with you in this pocket away from reality._

“But you won't,” she says simply, straightforward as usual, both hands on his scarred wrist imploringly. “You cannot hide here forever now that the battle is won. Did you think I wouldn't understand?”

“No,” Jaime responds quietly after a small pause. “You always understood.” There's a gutted, broken tremor in his voice when he says, despairingly, “I don't know how to deserve this. I don't know what I must do now.”

“I said I would stand beside you, fight beside you. I meant it—in more ways than just one.”

He starts to say something else but she brings his wrist to her mouth and presses her lips to the underside, quietening his relentless thoughts.

“We survived the _dead,_ Jaime. It can all wait until the sun rises in the morrow.”

She feels him nod, conceding, clutching her tightly. It's as if he can't get close enough. She certainly has never been held in this way before; it hits her that maybe he hasn't, either. The tension slowly drains out of him and she sighs, surrounded by him, smelling candle wax and sweat and sex in the air. She licks her lips, still tasting his mouth. He's pressed against her from head to toe like he belongs to her. Everything she's ever wanted but never begun to hope for in this chaotic, bloodthirsty world of theirs.

 _Until the sun rises_ , Brienne thinks, sinking into his warmth.

**Author's Note:**

> Wow season 8 sure was short with only three episodes in total but no complaints from me!


End file.
